Circulating Objects/Assemblages : Making Spaces/Creative Strategies

Outpost 091124

Sites centred around interactions of creative practice and architectural theories of making spaces.

Architecture understood as a collection of collective parts.

A diagrammatic art of lived abstraction and lived-in abstraction.

A space for inhabiting experience.

Attention to material : Architecture as the excitement of building/dwelling/becoming

An inhabiting event is the medium of architecture.

Garden : Spatial Markers/Bodies/Paths.

Spatial Practices : Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies. Tate Modern. #7

Zuzana Kovar, notes that the shortcoming of Tschumi's event is that while it introduces a processional understanding of architecture and mobilizes the body in space, space it self remains static.

Equation becomes a spatial assemblage for occurrences.

For Deleuze, an 'assemblage' extends the understanding between bodies and spaces.

Program is determinate.

Event is indeterminate.

A program gives a fixed outcome, a fixed spatial experience. An event does not, critically the 'notion of event' is that it activates potentialities. Each space, may be thought of as composed of multiple singular potentialities that lay dormant, unless activated. 

All spaces contain multiple potentialities.

Event Is Not Program.

There is no architecture without actions, no architecture without events, no architecture without program.

Architecture=Space + Event.

Tschumi.

Program is to be distinguished from 'event', a program is a determinate set of expected occurrences, a list of required utilities often based on social behavior, habit or custom. In contrast events occur as an indeterminate set of outcomes, revealing hidden potentialities or contradictions in a program and relating them to a particularly appropriate (or possibly exceptional) spatial configuration that may create conditions for unexpected events to occur.

Generating uncommon or unpredictable events through particular spatial configurations of the in-between.

Abject(ion) Studio Space.

Subjectivity/Spatial Bodies.

Discursive Objects/Architectural Occurrences/Resonances.

Assemblages, fired, raw pigments, paint, chalk, wax, plaster. 

The Enabling Constraint.

Objects become relational in conjunction with the ways in which the environment proposes its own constitutive limits.

Erin Manning.

Ceramics Speculative/Exploratory Practices.

New Ceramic Forms of Research/Theoretical Objects.

Huts/Follies/Pavilions : Experimental Lives/Reworking Subjectivity.

Outpost 241024

It seems that the significance of an aesthetic event is in its future.

Timothy Morton, Realist Magic : Objects, Ontology, Causality.

Reworking Subjectivity.

Actualizing Traces.

Vectors/Inscriptions and Field Conditions.

Theory and Things.

The Intuitive Practices of the Untutored Maker.

Experimental Lives.

On Simple Huts.

On Exercising Experience.

Huts, as Folly or Pavilion, serving a deeper impulse of curiosity, pleasure, experimentation, discipline. While the primitive hut belongs equally to 'what architecture is' and to 'what architecture is not' ironically its greatest significance may derive from the many non architectural ideas it engages.

Anne Cline.

Giving way to the nature of materials, new sensitivity, new subjectivity.

Ceramic objects of open intervals, intersections, inner places, and places in-between. 

These primal images give us back houses in which the human beings certainty of being is concentrated, and we have the impression that in images that are as stabilizing as these are, we could start a new life. A life that would be our own that would belong to us, in our very depths.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space.

Ann Cline.

It would seem then that the search for the primitive hut begins in play. A deconstructing process in which children seem to examine what is given them, intent upon taking it apart. While Rykwert's primitive is founded in the expression of origins, collectively imagined and believed. Bachelard's primitive is founded in the expressions of youth, not as vulgar nostalgia (as he emphatically warns) but in images as we should have imagined them during the 'original impulse' of youth.

In other times of cultural transition, the primitive hut, as invention or as a construct of experience, has brought humans to the edge of their normative existence and from there allowed perspective and experimentation.

The more 'primitive' the hut the more its creators recognized the arbitrariness of their own culture.

Within the inhabited hut, cultural issues and practices readily converge with an agility larger structures can never match. Huts bring together the physical environment with such disparate aspects of culture as necessity, fantasy, faith, and lifestyle. The hut, then, may be humankind's supreme experiment.

Divertissements and spectacles cover over the most basic human aspiration, to know what it is to have a human life.

Earth-House-Hold.

Gary Snyder. 1969

AM1.

Architecture, Art, Design, Fashion, History, Photography.

The Production of Space.

The Poetics of Space.

A Species of Spaces.

Space is not 'a priori' but rather a matter of relations between objects (things/phenomena).

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

Spatial Practices/Making Agency.

Circulation Diagram/Body/Space/Living/Activities/Production.

Movements/Interactions/Spaces/Volumes.

Tentative/Procedural Architecture (existential experiencing of built spaces).

Arakawa and Gins.

Body/Bodies as vector of movements/interactions/overlapping/navigating through interlocking/disparate spatial volumes.

Making and Meaning.

Andrew Higgott.

Peter Salter: Building Projects.

Architectural Association School.

Work created in design units such as that of Mike Gold, starting with the human figure as generator, or of Peter Wilson, prioritized sensibility over articulated theory, the evocative over the concrete: but the approach came to be evident in many student projects beyond these units. Much of this work was concerned with creating new forms of an architecture of meaning, and generating this meaning through a variety of intuitive devices.

As Peter Salter's own work developed, his interest in structural ingenuity gave way to a new sensitivity and subjectivity. A sensitivity to site and to the nature of materials, subjectivity in terms of making the personal and particular response. Seeing precedent in the practice of the Smithsons and other recent architects, but also in the practice of the untutored maker of things.

Grounding his work in the realization of the transformation of materials from natural form to the making of space: actualizing traces of context and echoes of history in its making. Rather than the more obvious and simple course of collaging fragments of pre-existing forms, it understands such devices and has an intuitive resonance of them. 

Architecture in Abjection.

What Greg Lynn in the 1990s is laying out here, following Deleuze and Guattari, is a relational understanding of the world, as opposed to an understanding based on things. For Deleuze and Guattari, relations occur not only between things but within the things themselves, such that the world is a vibrating field of potential, never in a moment of stasis or being but always changing. It is therefore very much about the in-between, and it is this in-between, this field of relations, that is a multiplicity.

Although Lynn's reference to and adoption of philosophical concepts has no doubt been productive not only for his own practice but for the architectural discipline as a whole, the simplification of that philosophy serves to overlook many further-reaching implications, such as the reworking of subjectivity.

Simplification of borrowed thought is thus one key criticism in this respect. The other, which applies not only to Lynn but also to architects engaging with the concept of emergence, rests in the application of that thought as an organisational and form-generating strategy.

Influenced by the emergent behaviours within networks, swarms, flocks and so on, the key thing to point out with the uptake of a processional or relational mode of thought within architecture is the shift in emphasis from the end product – the building – to the process through which the  building is conceived – the design process. The important aspect is how a form is generated, and how its parts interact and are organised, rather than the form itself.

Flows of various kinds and scales, make up architecture and connect it with the world.

Event (Deleuze/Guattari) as defined by Movement in terms of vectors and field relations, of Time or the idea that all things change, and Scale an awareness and importance of the similarities in relations across any number of scales become pertinent.

Arakawa and Gins explore a house with a client that at appears at first to be a pile of material. But that upon occupation, it expands into a habitable series of rooms whose volume shifts in relation to the movement of bodies within them.

Studio Works/Architectural Surrounds : Drawing into the indeterminacy of boundaries.

Outpost 250924

Research Collage 2015

Disjunction and Event/Architecture In/Between.

The task of the architect is to modulate, orchestrate, or simplify the potential reciprocity, indifference, or conflict that spaces can generate. Most problems in architecture are disjunctive, namely they are multiple, heterogeneous, divergent and even contradictory, involving site, program, budget, schedule, and interest groups, among other factors. All of these contradicting and disjunctive forces eventually contaminate one another. Bernard Tschumi, Notes on Architecture 2010 (unpublished).

Making/Adaptations/Using The Made.

Drawing into the indeterminacy of boundaries.

Organism-Person-Environment

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/

Studio Drawings.

On Feeling More Matter than Form.

There is always more of everything than a thing can contain.

Immediate Architectural Experiences.

Bodies, Spaces and Their Relations.

Creating an independent yet meaningful reality, that are direct aesthetic experiences of the real.

Kenzo Tange.

Regaining our experience in a world of mass media  culture, regaining a world that is directly lived.

Ann Cline.

Architectural Body/Sited Awareness.

Arakawa and Gins  end up pointing to the inseparability and affect of body and surround, for them this inseparability is what gives rise to the architectural body. They write that a person should never be considered apart from her surroundings, that their hypothesis of the Architectural Body/Sited Awareness, announces the indivisibility of seemingly separate fields of bioscleave: a person and an architectural surround, and that the two together give procedural architecture its basic unit of study the architectural body.

This results in a certain indeterminacy of boundaries, as body and surround are collapsed into one, and as they are constantly shifting in relation to one another. 

The architectural body is a body that can and cannot be found. 

Boundaries for an architectural body can only be suggested, never determined.

Architecture in Abjection.

Zuzana Kovar.

Relevance/Relation as a way of organizing things through both contingency (philosophy) and metonymy (linguistics).

Relevance has by its nature, wiggle room because things have wiggle room. Because things never quite coincide with how they appear for or how they are used by or interpreted by other things (and possibly even themselves).

What we want to do and how we feel and what we are wanting and feeling about are all mashed together into an ecological awareness.

The Context of Relevance is Structurally Incomplete.

Whenever you want to do something, you always encounter a whole thicket of things that are relevant to what you're wanting to do. This thicket of things creates an explosion of contextualization, and you can't – won't be able to stop it.

Timothy Morton.

An interconnection without an edge or centre called General Economy.

Bataille.

Architecture and Material Practice

Katie Lloyd Thomas.

Susannah Hagan argues for a return to a cyclic model where matter is only ever reformed and make (or adapt) architecture accordingly – but without necessarily returning to old forms of building. In a responsible future, architects may have to relinquish their role as form givers, and 'grow' materials rather than give them shape.

Social imperatives and new technologies may well, finally, be the undoing of the grip that hylomorphism has held on architectural and material practices for so long.

Caryatids/Project Spaces.

Architectural Surrounds.

Studio Floor Drawing/Painting.

Mattering/Of and For the Body of Others.

Material Worlds : Frottage, charcoal, wax, Indian Ink, crayon on water.

Material and buildings are always implicated, in and of the world. In discussing her work with a group of African women who are beginning the process of making their own homes, Doina Petrescu asks how their principle of 'putting together and sharing' might be realized in an architectural project. 

The specificities of place, culture, gender and local forms of negotiation make an 'architecture' that is more fluid than solid, and more matter than form, and demonstrate the radical alterity of building in another context.

Architecture in Abjection.

Organism-Person-Environment

Human bodies and spaces flow  through one another – a chemical indiscernibility that is invisible.

Two of the most fundamental things that come out of the work of Rahm and Arakawa and Gins for architecture, in mapping out a more open-ended and volatile understanding of bodies and spaces, are the reduction of these to matter and a thinking in terms of relations or events rather than static and discrete entities. These link directly into the area of process and intelligent material philosophy that is at the forefront of this thinking, and that is employed here, namely through the work of Deleuze and Guattari, in order to approach abject(ion) productively. 

What the introduction of abject(ion) and a reading of it through the filter of Deleuze and Guattari allows for and contributes on top of its own way of reworking dualities is a bringing together of the material and processual approaches already in play within the work of Rahm and Arakawa and Gins, respectively. It is with this in mind that we move to the Kristevan concept.

The Hot Death. 2006.

Philippe Rahm.

Rahm's work has a very particular quality. There is almost no building, which is usually the measure or ground of architecture. There is nothing left but the ritual, experience, coder and effect of architecture itself.

Physiological/Meteorological Architecture operates across fields of art, architecture and science. Rahm through his spaces, manipulates temperature, oxygen and hormone levels. Importantly, as his works straddle this range of fields, it frees up the architecture, allowing it to be distilled down to its effects and to experience.

An architecture that gets distilled down to experience and the chemical exchanges between body and space. It begins to function within a similar realm to abject(ion). It becomes about a visceral assault, an affect that passes through the subject.

This extracorporeal space, especially in contemporary man, consists of filling to the point of overflow where the subject is ensnared, a condition  of the state of stress and an endemic breach of adaptation.

The Hot Death is a choreography piece that investigates the indiscernibility of the body and space at a chemical level. A levelling between body and space occurs, where the temperature of the space slowly comes to equal that of the living body, stabilising the two and eliminating their differences: a  play on death.

The bodies are on stage at the start of the order of individuality, each with its own movements, independently of others, as a multitude of energy. Then gradually, the temperature, humidity of the room rises to match that of the human body. The movements are slower, heavier, gravity wins put up any ground, motionless, without more space between, more movement possible.

Body and space are at the fundamental level of a base materialism, merely matter, and that because of this, 'can wind quintets carry and spread the flu virus?' such exchanges are possible.

Raum's work moves away from an architecture that is constituted by body and space to an architecture that is the active exchange between body and space. It is in this understanding – that bodily and spatial boundaries are not clearly demarcated as architecture still generally assumes them to be, and that they regularly are transgressed and diluted – that constitutes a move beyond dualistic modes of thought.

Frameworks/Tentative Architectures : Drawing Architectural Surrounds

 Outpost 291024

Making/Building made indeterminate through a retention/questioning of a framework and the insertion of an event that introduces a slippage/deviation of that of a framed outcome.

Bernard Tschumi. (equation as a provisional framework)

Tentative/Processual Architectures. 

Arakawa and Gins.

Lucy Orta.

Shortcomings of Phenomenological Thought.

One places oneself at the centre, designates oneself, measures oneself and uses oneself as a measure. One is in short a 'subject' and space is a projection of oneself or its counterpart, that it is defined therefore not in its own right, but in relation to the subject. Space, my space is not the context of which I constitute the 'textuality' instead it is first of all my body and then it is my body's counterpart or other, its mirror-image or shadow. It is the shifting intersection between that which touches, penetrates, threatens or benefits my body on the one hand and all other bodies on the other. This maintains the boundaries between body and space, subject and object.

Henri Lefebvre.

Phenomenology always stops at boundaries, at the boundary of the body, which is precisely where abject(ion) continues beyond. It is because phenomenology concerns the lived body rather than bodies in a plural and more general sense that it is a discussion of wholes rather than transitions and exchanges unable to accommodate volatile processes.

Inhabitations : Cultures Of Melting Snow.

The In-Between.

There is no room for the in-between, no way to describe exchanges between entities and the effect of those exchanges. All is static and no cannot as Francois Jullien wrote of Plato, think of the snow in the process of melting. One can only think of either snow or water, but never the process of change.

Abject(ion) Architectures of Process, with brings to the fore interrelated areas of Relational Architecture and Emergent Phenomena.

Architecture in Abjective(Abject (ion) States of Subjectivity.

Frameworks/Scaffolding.

Affective Matter/Mattering.

Kovar turns to Abjection a concept developed by Julia Kristeva, abjection-abject(ion) is both process and product, and can hold a discussion of the transgression of borders. It concerns anything that crosses the symbolic, anything that is expelled literally or figuratively, and that is necessary to keep at bay in order for subjectivity to prevail, issuing from abject(ion) is therefore a threat to our subjectivity, a threat to the boundary between Subject-Object/Body-Space.

Expanding on the processual and material nature of abject(ion), such an undertaking begins with Event and is rounded off with discussions of Affect and Matter.

Zuzana Kovar.

A Disclaimer.

Following Deleuze this book is interested in what 'Abject(ion)' does, rather than what it is.

Drawing (at times) on aspects of the same theory, Kristeva is interested in the disruption of psychological boundaries and Deleuze who deals with both psychological and physical boundaries. Through Deleuze we are able to engage with abject(ion) more holistically.

This book is not concerned with making 'abject' architecture, that is making buildings with abject matter. But is rather concerned with developing ways of thinking about bodies, spaces, and the relations within and between these through the lens of abject(ion).

Architecture in abject(ion) promotes an interest revealed by a sensibility that favours theory and textual practice over images and objects, and goes towards explaining why illustrations of examples referred to throughtout are withheld.

Project 3.1

Body aject(ion) space: A collection of contracts.

The Contracts is the collective name given to a series of projects that explore the notion of abject(ion) as event. Critically, The Contracts are not only explorations (as accommodated by Tschumi), bur also spatial events (as accommodated by Deleuze), and hence the architecture that is defined by the interplay of these events. Given the centrality to this book of the simultaneous abject(ion) of human bodies and spatial bodies, and the indiscernibility in which this results, The  Contracts have come to span a period of three years, hence establishing themselves as the most developed body of work included here.

Architecture in Abjection.

Bodies-Spaces-and Their Relations.

Zuzana Kovar.

A Species of Spaces.

Reclaimations, between a desk and a skip.

Russell Coates.

Archive Mappings/Concerns : Lines/Linkages/Nodes/Points/Intersections.

Architectural Constructs/Events into Material/Making.

Abject (ion) : Affective Resonances/Matter : Clay+Ceramic.

Vessels/Voids/Making from folded spaces.

The simple issues of attending to the material.

Re-Casting Matter, not 'materials'.

Becoming mindful of 'materials' and their 'hylomorphic tendencies'.

Clay retains transitions and exchanges, collects up discrete entities/symbols/inscriptions, places them into volatile spaces/processes of change .

Questioning Subjectivity : Fluidity of matter/material out of place.

The Cinema of Catherine Breillat.

The Process of Abject(ion).

In critical theory, abjection is the state of being cast off and separated from norms and rules, especially on the scale of society and morality. The term has been explored in post-structuralism as that which inherently disturbs conventional identity and cultural concepts. Julia Kristeva explored an influential and formative overview of the concept in her 1980 work Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, where she describes subjective horror (abjection) as the feeling when an individual experiences or is confronted by the sheer experience of what Kristeva calls one's typically repressed "corporeal reality", or an intrusion of the Real in the Symbolic Order.

The process of a body excreting from within itself. A transition between inside and outside, a disruption of physical and psychological boundaries of the still prevalent understanding of body as subject and space as object.

A moment of indiscernibility, the result of which is the product of repulsion, the abject and where body, space and abject become an ambiguity, ranging in intensity from subtle gestures to confronting actions immersed in the viscosity of our leaky bodies.

The Darkness of Interiors/ The Absence of Openings.

Outpost 081024

Connections remaining sensuously in play.

The Darkness of Interiors/ The Absence of Openings.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/

On the formation of the Japanese house.

In making for ourselves a place to live we first spread a parasol to throw a shadow on the earth, and in the pale light of the shadow we put together a house. The quality that we call beauty must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows.

In Praise of Shadows, Jun'ichiro Tanizaki. 1933

The Trace Drawing

Interstitial Mappings/Spaces/Interiors/Parts/Intimacies.

Obviously, it is not being suggested that we should somehow be able to think something timber back into its tree, nevertheless, the reciprocal associations enjoyed by obtaining the one from the other depend upon certain conditions of connection remaining sensuously in play.

Peter Beardsell.

Making with circumstance/attention to place.

Giving buildings decisive readings that inform our readings of place.

A 'decisiveness' arrived at through attention and circumstance.

Living in a world reconstructed by information, deformed by restrictive economies.

Ontologically/Making Relations, having something to do with its being, not with exactly how it appears or its data – measure. Flat ontology is an idea that things exist in the same kind of way, no matter what they are. 

Things are much more mashed together than we like to think, and also much more distinct.

The biosphere is made of its parts, but it is distinct from its parts, and these parts are not reducible 'upwards' into wholes – the 'biosphere'.

There is one Biosphere, and its whole is less than the sum of its parts. Because the whole is one, and the parts are many and things exist in the same kind of way (flat ontology). Parts are distinct and non reducible if they exist in the same kind of way, no matter what they are.

Timothy Morton. 

You Are The Weather.

Roni Horn.

Weather isn't just a symptom or climate.

Anselm Kiefer.

The High Priestess. 1989

VIII : Book 88

In this book as a whole nature and architecture alike convey only the absence of life.

Armin Zweite.

Grey Works/Charcoal.

Lead/Ceramic/Inscriptions.

Weird Things

Things are entangled with interpretations of things, yet different from them.

Tim Morton, the thinker of that thought.

Reflecting on the bamboo screens and log columns of Osaka and Kamiichi, I realise that those details could be read as some kind of mask for a bucolic future. However, the choice of detail is derived from the capability of the material's presence to determine the quality of space- what the late David Pye refers to in his book Nature and the  Art of Workmanship as 'the weather in the space'. Japan has confirmed my view that architecture is inclusive – a collusion between different technologies and constructions that make the relevant accommodation for society.

Peter Salter. 

A Hut Life.

A life-lived as it is evolving.

Of Japanese/Chinese reclusive poets.

Interstitial Spaces.

The interior structure braces the external timber shell against snow loads. Between the braces are interior rooms for looking out. Moving between these rooms is like walking in the space 'between' which is sometimes 'clogged' by structure.

Kamiichi Pavilion, Peter Salter. 1995 

The hut and its hut life is a material process of living a relation, not (restricted or contextualized) as form or its container. The hut retains that which is frequently 'explained away' by relating things to a decade, a country, a state of human economic relations.

Roof top turrets, bits of former utility. A city of huts, of hut dwellers, of found places, of inspiration for new memories even as they invoke old ones. Visiting one another's sites, they climb creaky stairs and slip onto rooftops, balconies, or parapets. There they touch something deep in the needs and memory of people. Something that refuses to be dismissed, yet is fully alive only in the hut.

Anne Cline.

Kamiichi Mountain Pavilion.

4+1 Peter Salter : Building Projects.

The Buildings Reactions to the Weather/Ground/River and View.

Steadily the snow buries the building, but the exterior shell, which takes compression like a boat and behaves almost as if the building were in water, inversely anticipates the snow-load. This annual load exerts wear and tear, and will repeatedly leave its marks and defacements by way of distortion and pressure. But the building is designed to encode and record these batterings.

Conditions of Connection, Peter Beardsell.

The building is located in a clearing on the edge of a meltwater river. The intent is to provide a place to rest and enjoy the view. The building is first seen from a bridge through a clearing in the trees. Visitors approach it by a path along the river's edge.

Once within the building, their movement is directed towards a special room which is oriented towards the borrowed landscape, with a view of the two mountain peaks at the head of the valley.

A large gutter on the south side brings this water into the building, as if to guide the visitor. This same gutter also becomes the entrance canopy to the building, offering shade from the summer sun. The building aims to be cool in summer, full of shadows, with views out to the bright reflected light.

The building is naturally lit, with no electricity, and fresh water is provided by a hand-pump. All timber used in the construction has been taken from renewable or second-hand sources. The building is closed down in winter and becomes a part of the snow covered landscape.

Before the onset of winter, the townspeople of Kamiichi come to clean and prepare the building for the expected snow. It is then left to the small hibernating mammals and roosting birds. In the spring the shutters are opened and the snow barriers removed.

The copper water tank collects water from the gutter on the south elevation. Three overflows celebrate the abundance of meltwaters in the spring.

Section of first proposal. It was intended that the building should collect snow along its slatted roof structure, allowing the melted snow to drip down through the interior of the building.

Paper cut-outs were used to reassess the mass of the building proposition.

The building is snow-bound for seven months of the year, with snow reaching 12m. It is shaped hydro-dynamically to resist the snow, with two timber latticed compression shells. Within these shell structures a new landscape is created, as a resting place for climbers and a winter hibernation space for animals.

Students in Peter Salter's Diploma Unit are often asked to work at scales of 1:500 and 1:5, and nothing in-between. The defining properties of a strategy (not a programme) describable at 1:500 should carry a definitional force capable of determining detail at 1:5. Intermediate scales are disallowed to let a strategy's connective energies make their way, unimpeded, into detail. One applying pressure on the other, both tightens and expands the possibilities of connection and exchange.

Afterword/Making with beautiful circumstances.

Rules For Detail/A Search For Legibility Through Detail.

Peter Salter.

Rules are made to govern the definition of space through the accuracy of constructional detail. In the reading of such detail the spatial emphasis of the room can be understood to be mute or otherwise, giving it a kind of legibility. This ordering and quality of space help determine the accommodation and relevance of the architecture in circumstances where the programmatic brief is unavailable, underdeveloped or redundant. Legibility implies a variation in the reading and definition of the proposition. This is explored through a number of recurring strategies:

To make ever finer territories in order to relieve the burden of scale upon the architectural piece.

To look for possible scale differences – architecture as furniture – as a way of offering emphasis within a sequence of rooms.

To work with an additive architectural programme rather than a conglomerate form.

To introduce the metaphor of the boat as a raft that assembles parts of programme common to the wider building form.

Each strategy offers tactics for proceeding and the possibility of detail. Each implies a layering, a kind of stratification of idea and details; the control of the spatial hierarchy and the design of the door furniture can be layered together.

The strategy offers rules for construction when intuition runs out, and a way of testing form. The layering suggests an in-situ construction – a serialising of programme that offers a crafted building.

Ceramics

Anglian Potters.

Cambridge Exhibition.

https://www.anglianpotters.org.uk/members/russell-moreton/

Drawing : Layers of relationships, intimacy and circumstance

Outpost 070324

Speculative Haptic Experimentation.

Oxyrhynchus.

Jenny Saville.

John Elderfield. 2015

Several new works are inspired by the ancient Egyptian rubbish dump at Oxyrhynchus, one of the most important archaeological sites ever discovered. Heaps of discarded documents and literature; fragments incredibly preserved are now invaluable. Greek texts as Euclid's Elements and the poems of Sappho are among the excavated papyri.

Saville alludes to this history through a deep layering of paired subjects, faces, torsos, and limbs overlap with shadows and reflections creating palimpsests of living bodies and ancestral apparitions. Silhouettes drawn in charcoal through the surfaces of oil paint underscore the motion of the central embracing figures, while evoking the timeless process of sketching.

Time, figures, and carnality is further compressed by Saville's adaptation of various historical approaches to portraiture. From De Kooning's fluid abstractions of the female figure, to the almost combined couples of Picasso's late paintings and Japanese Shunga prints.

These intermediate studies echo the shifting status of the unearthed papers, once discarded now treasured. The depth and density of things now excavated from their surroundings are now brought into thinner layers of relationships, intimacy and circumstance. Saville's own figures merge ethereally with settings that have been loosely appropriated from photographs and evoke the backdrops of Renaissance Paintings.

 

The Human Clay.

The School of London

On Drawing, John Berger.

Michael Grimshaw.

40 Drawings 1968-1995

Drawing is the architecture of the spirit.

The drawings in this exhibition track a progression, both chronologically and through shifts of language. Inevitably there are tangents and seductions.

The more I draw the more I discover that drawing is really an echo of our being. Its sound, its voice is beyond ideas and runs all reason ragged.

I was interested in drawing 'ordinariness' because nothing seemed more interesting or as magical. This feeling is still no less dull than it was then.

The dense, mysterious spaces and shapes of her paisley dress terrified me and her shifting, speaking head was so impossible to understand as I sat in front of her on the carpet in an urgent and perplexed state. I struggled to make sense of what I saw and felt. These drawings often drew laughter from my mother and father but, in spite of their gentle mockery, I sensed that somewhere buried ion this activity of drawing there lay a wondrous elemental power.

When I look and see an ink drawing of Tobias by Rembrandt, a stubbed pencil remark of Martha lying in the bath by Pierre Bonnard or, say, a cigarette smoking hand by Philip Guston, then clearly, beyond ideas, it is the vision, the coming closer, that really matters.

Today this mysterious quality remains as primal and as tantalising as it did then. My own conceit, the facade and crude consciousness of ideas cannot undo the profound igniting and unconscious power of drawing.

Corpus/Borderlands : A Society in Excess, Marc Auge.

Corpus : Photographic drawings from human outlines

Borderlines : Cley 19, speculative submission for exhibition

ANTHROPOLOGICAL NOTIONS AROUND ISSUES OF SPACES, ORIGINS, SOCIAL RITUALS AND TABOOS.

CREATING CREATIVE ANTHROPOLOGY INTO TEMPORAL SITES, between the concrete and the spatial.

Utilising processes and strategies and terminologies. 

Demarcation, set the boundaries or limits.

Acculturate, assimilate to a different culture.

Ethnology, the study of the characteristics of different peoples and the differences and relationships between them.

NON- SPACES, Introduction to an anthropology of super modernity. Marc Auge. My working practice intuitively reflects and responds to what Marc Auge considers to be the condition of Supermodemity, briefly his defining parameters on the idea of Supermodemity are.

Overabundance of events. 

Spatial overabundance.

The individualization of references. A SOCIETY IN EXCESS.

My creative practice attempts to reconstitute spaces from this condition of Supermodemity into temporal sites, places from which to solicit a sense of a mobile anthropology, a dwelling that is both intimate and public and promotes solitudes and subjectivity.

Marc Auge states the twenty-first century will be anthropological, not because the three figures of excess are just the current form of a perennial raw material which is the very ore of anthropology, but also because in situations of supermodemitiy the components pile up without destroying one another.1

Contemporary Practitioners like anthropologists will attempt to make sense, they will attempt to resolve, to make or rather remake meaning through the processes of observing the phenomena of acculturation. 

1  Marc Auge, Non-Places, introduction to an anthropology of super modernity. (London: Verso, 1992) page 41.

Submission Guidelines

All proposals must be for new work that addresses the brief, artists are encouraged to experiment, be playful and push the boundaries of their practice.

BORDERLINES

Artists translate cultural moments and offer responses to their environment, whether geographical, political or spiritual. Inviting artist's to respond to the theme Borderlines as it requires an inquisitive approach to the site that surrounds them and to the climate in which we live.

Geographical Environmental Landscape

Terrain

Migration (Wildlife/Humans) Transmigration

Socio Political Departure

Borderlands

Borderlines

Borders

Lines

Spiritual Embodied Walking

Wandering 

Wanderlust 

Movement

Borderlines, simultaneously both boundary and threshold.

Visible, Existential, Imaginative, Porous, Contingent, Reflexive, Nowness, Un-Knowing, Awkwardness, Liminality, Territory, Subjectivity,

Concrete Collage : Raku fragment, clay form/photograph, drawing, handwriting and painted surfaces.

 Ancient Lights : Abstract Painting and Constructional Drawing for Architectural Glass. 

Anthropological Landscape : Drawing from archaeological dig, liquid light, field chalk, charcoal. 

Cley, St Margaret's South Entrance : Collage, Sketchbook, working ideas for small glass panels. 

Cell, Court, Domain, Field : Layered paper, paint, and absent objects.

Architectural Concerns : Collage ,drawing, installation, blue prints, historical building plans. Scriptorium : Architectural model for a reading space within a pastoral landscape or community.

Working Notes/Extracts and Fragments from site visit. St Margaret's Church

Silence and stillness, social/historical shelter from/within the landscape

A place acting through our sensate/spiritual world, a space crafted by the specificity of its making/usage. 

An interior sensing space of a protected and defended/fortified silence, affirming beliefs and community.

Subtle and muted, stillness, embodiment from the patina of use. Bleached woodwork, lightness, dryness and the humidity of absences.

Empty and eroded stone mullion windows/ancient lights, architecture framing its un-making worn, broken and repaired flooring surfaces, ceramic and stone.

What does Borderlines mean to you? Boundary and Threshold

Visible, existential, imaginative, porous, contingent, reflexive, nowness, un-knowing, awkwardness, liminal, territory,

Material Process/Inquiry, Praxis, Content, Context

Form, Existential Qualities/Values AGENCY

Mindfullness of the brief to discover things through the inquiry and engagement with the site. 

Develop Inquiry

Documentation, Artist Book, and other media mixed media painting

Small series of glass panels ceramic tiles/facades

Photographic material/photograms, drawings/hangings on Chinese paper

Melancholy Landscapes : The Plague/Vermilion Sands

Film Collages, hybrid processes and temporal states Liminality: Literature/Philosophy/Visual Art

Landscapes : entering/intruding/emerging (holga819) Existential Gestures : Looking away from the sea

Ballard : Vermilion Sands : Speculative Fields/Spatial Practices Albert Camus : The Plague, 1947. (Penguin Fiction)

The townspeople of Oran are in the grip of a virulent plague.

Cut off from the rest of the world, living in fear, they each respond in their own way to the grim challenge of the deadly bacillus. Among them is Dr Rieux, a humanitarian and healer, and it is through his eyes that that we witness the devastating course of the epidemic.

Written in 1947, just after the Nazi occupation of France, Camus's magnificent novel is also a story of courage and determination against the arbitrariness and seeming absurdity of human existence.

'Camus represents a particularly modem type of temperament, a mystic soul in a Godless universe, thirsty for the absolute, forever rebellious against the essential injustice of the human condition'

Shusha Guppy, Sunday Times

Walking into Emergent Landscapes 

Walking/Thinking/Physical Entanglements in the Landscape

Deeper Darkness, Photographic Memory/Process, Metonymy, Negative,

Analogue, Negated Nocturne. Walking, Others, Presence, Becoming,

Walking into Emergent Landscapes : Covehithe Beach

The OLD WAYS, a JOURNEY ON FOOT, Robert Macfarlane

“ Walking was a means of personal myth-making, but it also shaped his everyday longings:

 Edward Thomas not only thought on paths and of them, but also with them.”

“To Thomas, paths connected real places but they also led out-wards to metaphysics, backwards to history and inward to the self. These traverses- between the conceptual, the spectral and the personal-occur often without signage in his writing, and are among its most characteristic events. He imagined himself in topographical terms.”

The Drawing Stage : The Mark that Functions/Comes into a Mediality/Form/Language

Outpost 210524

Light Drawings/Duration/Surface/Intermediaries.

Drawing/Inscriptions/Mediality/Conversation

I created 'False Divisions' in an effort to name the parts which in practice are so multifaceted as to continuously express the existence of all others.

What defines/constitutes drawing? 

One thinks of its properties, line, marks, surfaces, its characteristic colourlessness, its acts, gestures, rhythms and spaces of thought.

Avis Newman.

The Stage Of Drawing-Gesture-And-Acts.

Avis Newman.

Catherine de Zegher.

As I made my choices, the body of the exhibition grew as an assemblage of parts comprising groups within groups, clusters, pairs, singularities, a 'body of relations' as one might understand a body of thought. In the selection and organisation, I tried to suggest that drawing is by definition in a state of flux finding inspiration in 'modes of thought' that are not linear. But which propose a space of fluctuations and overlapping relationships and allow for an uncertainty and a play between parts as in Melanie Klein's formulations of positions.

Drawing, draws us in close, into an act of scrutiny, retracing the drawer's movements between hand and eye is one of the profound pleasures of looking which connects us to a recognition of our own past acts. When we look, we enter the intimate space of a work that is as close to the action of an artist's thought as one can get.

Avis Newman understands drawing more fundamentally as to evidence the materialization of an act of consciousness, where a gestural act, embodies an act of thought. Her concern has been with the visual traces of those phenomena, which are embedded in all our actions and ultimately connect us through language.

In the inscriptive act of drawing there exists the shadow of our ambivalent relation to making marks, before the time when 'image' and 'text' are differentiated to go their separate ways. When one looks at a drawing there is a consciousness of the ghost of the 'text' in the 'image' in the Image. It is that combination of events where the mind simultaneously perceives in a single stroke the registration of a gesture affirming the existence of another, a line of delineation that speaks of this or that and the mark that functions (comes into a mediality) as a sign which possibly is connected to other signs. In such circumstances thoughts float between reading and perceiving. It is in this inscriptive nature of the activity of drawing that can hold we can hold in suspension this differentiated state of consciousness, irrespective of what is being drawn.

Generative Forms.

Drawing Assemblages.

Germ Cell/Idea/Breath.

The synthesis of Geometric with Organic Forms.

Christopher Wilmarth

Nine Clearing Works.

A portal, an architectural entranceway.

Wilmarth continually examined the concept of duality, contrasts between light and shadow, transparency and opacity, heaviness and weightlessness, materiality and ethereality. He employed a 'painterly technique' that emphasized the tactility and richness of his materials, which like an alchemist he persistently sought to transform.

His sculptures retain the spiritual implications of 'place' endowed with particular qualities of light, clearings that can create a release, where light can open even when the place remains the same, just like the mind and new thoughts, creating moments of these pavement epiphanies of confinement and release.

Works from 1985 onwards contain and further develop a figurative impulse ( re-emerging of the anthropomorphic ovoid shapes) with the larger more emphatically abstract 'places'. Fusing the organic with the geometric and conjuring a multitude of symbols, head-soul-heart-aura-egg-germ cell-womb-cup.

Laura Rosenstock. 1989

A Clearing for a Standing Man. 1974

Poetics of place and person articulated by the evocative power of light.

He endowed his sculptures with a sense of  'Place' and 'Person' which was critical to his intension as was his lifelong concern with the evocative power of light.

Light gains character as it touches the world, from what is lighted and who is there to see. I associate the significant moments of my life with the character of light at the time. The universal implications of my original experience have located in and become signified by kinds of light. My sculptures are places to generate this experience compressed into light and shadow and return them to the world as a physical poem.

On Mallarmé, Wilmarth notes that his imagination and reverie meant more to him than anything  that was actually of this world. His work is about the anguish and longing of experience not fully realized, and Wilmarth found something of himself in it, especially the feeling that for Mallarmé 'the essence of a work consists precisely in what is not expressed'.  

Christopher Wilmarth. 

Christina Iglesias.

Shelters

Ceramics of Organic Abstraction.

A loosely defined style characterised by an ongoing exploration of biomorphic or organic form and surface.

Garth Clark.

Rising Above The Polemic : Organic Abstraction in British Ceramics. 1995.

References to landscape and natural phenomena, nature's associations of fecundity, earthiness, process, growth and decay.

Gordon Baldwin.